News About Time And Spacehttp://www.spacedaily.com/Time_And_Space.html
News About Time And SpaceWed, 29 JUL 2015 11:27:38 AESTWed, 29 JUL 2015 11:27:38 AESTen-us
Garching, Germany (SPX) Jul 28, 2015 -
Using archival data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, as well as from the XMM-Newton and Chandra X-ray telescopes, a team of astronomers at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics have discovered a gigantic black hole, which is probably destroying and devouring a big star in its vicinity. With a mass of 100 million times more than our Sun, this is the largest black hole caught in this act so far.

The results of this study are published in this month's issue of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Andrea Merloni and members of his team from the Max-Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) in Garching, near Munich, were exploring the huge archive of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) in preparation for a future X-ray satellite mission.

The SDSS has been observing a large fraction of the night sky with its optical telescope; in addition, spectra have been taken of distant galaxies and black holes. For a variety of reasons, some objects got the spectra taken more than once. And when the team was looking at one of the objects with multiple spectra, they were struck by an extraordinary change in one of the objects under study, with the catalogue number SDSS J0159+0033.

"Usually distant galaxies do not change significantly over an astronomer's lifetime, i.e. on a timescale of years or decades," explains Andrea Merloni, "but this one showed a dramatic variation of its spectrum, as if the central black hole had switched on and off."

This happened between 1998 and 2005, but nobody had noticed the odd behaviour of this galaxy until late last year, when two groups of scientists preparing the next (fourth) generation of SDSS surveys independently stumbled across these data [1].

Luckily enough, the two flagship X-ray observatories, the ESA-led XMM-Newton and the NASA-led Chandra took snapshots of the same area of the sky close in time to the peak of the flare, and again about ten years later. This gave the astronomers unique information about the high-energy emission that reveals how material is processed in the immediate vicinity of the central black hole.

Gigantic black holes are at home in the nuclei of large galaxies all around us. Most astronomers believe that they grew to the enormous sizes that we can observe today by feeding mostly on interstellar gas from its surroundings, which is unable to escape its gravitational pull. Such a process takes place over a very long time (tens to hundreds of millions of years), and is capable to turn a small black hole created in the explosion of a heavy star into the super-heavyweight monsters that lurk at the centre of galaxies.

However, galaxies also contain a huge number of stars. Some unlucky ones may happen to pass too close to the central black hole, where they are destroyed and eventually swallowed by the black hole.

If this is compact enough, the strong, tidal gravitational forces tear the star apart in a spectacular way. Subsequently bits and pieces swirl into the black hole and thus produce huge flares of radiation that can be as luminous as all the rest of the stars in the host galaxy for a period of a few months to a year. These rare events are called Tidal Disruption Flares (TDF).

Merloni and his collaborators quite quickly realised that "their" flare [2] matched almost perfectly all the expectations of this model. Moreover, because of the serendipitous nature of the discovery, they realised that this was an even more peculiar system than those which had been found through active searches until now [3]. With an estimated mass of 100 million solar masses, this is the biggest black hole caught in the act of star-tearing so far.

However, the sheer size of the system is not the only intriguing aspect of this particular flare; it is also the first one for which scientists can assume with some degree of certainty that the black hole was on a more standard "gas diet" very recently (a few tens of thousands of years). This is an important clue on which sort of food black holes mostly live on.

"Louis Pasteur said: 'Chance favours the prepared mind' - but in our case, nobody was really prepared," marvels Merloni. "We could have discovered this unique object already ten years ago, but people did not know where to look. It is quite common in astronomy that progress in our understanding of the cosmos is helped by serendipitous discoveries. And now we have a better idea of how to find more such events, and future instruments will greatly expand our reach."

In less than two years' time a new powerful X-ray telescope eROSITA, which is currently being built at MPE, will be put into orbit on the Russian-German SRG satellite. It will scan the entire sky with the right cadence and sensitivity needed to discover hundreds of new tidal disruption flares. Also, big optical telescopes are being designed and built with the goal of monitoring the variable sky, and will greatly contribute to solving the mystery of the black hole eating habits. Astronomers will have to be prepared to catch these dramatic last acts of a star's life. But however prepared they'll be, the sky will be full of new surprises.

Notes:
1. The other group, who independently discovered the strange light curve of this object was Stephanie LaMassa (Yale) and her collaborators. They were the fastest to alert the community about this object, but did not explore the stellar disruption interpretation for this event.

2. The current study is published in the May issue of the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (see also reference in right column).

3. Tidal Disruption Flares are very rare, about one every few tens of thousands of year for any galaxy. In addition, because they do not last very long, they are very hard to find. Only about twenty of them have been studied so far, but with the advent of larger telescopes designed to survey large areas of the sky in a short time, more and more dedicated searches are being carried out, and the pace of discovery is rapidly increasing.

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Wed, 29 JUL 2015 11:27:38 AEST
Rochester NY (SPX) Jul 27, 2015 -
Quantum theory is one of the great achievements of 20th century science, yet physicists have struggled to find a clear boundary between our everyday world and what Albert Einstein called the "spooky" features of the quantum world, including cats that could be both alive and dead, and photons that can communicate with each other across space instantaneously.

For the past 60 years, the best guide to that boundary has been a theorem called Bell's Inequality, but now a new paper shows that Bell's Inequality is not the guidepost it was believed to be, which means that as the world of quantum computing brings quantum strangeness closer to our daily lives, we understand the frontiers of that world less well than scientists have thought.

In the new paper, published in the July 20 edition of Optica, University of Rochester researchers show that a classical beam of light that would be expected to obey Bell's Inequality can fail this test in the lab, if the beam is properly prepared to have a particular feature: entanglement.

Not only does Bell's test not serve to define the boundary, the new findings don't push the boundary deeper into the quantum realm but do just the opposite. They show that some features of the real world must share a key ingredient of the quantum domain. This key ingredient is called entanglement, exactly the feature of quantum physics that Einstein labeled as spooky.

According to Joseph Eberly, professor of physics and one of the paper's authors, it now appears that Bell's test only distinguishes those systems that are entangled from those that are not. It does not distinguish whether they are "classical" or quantum. In the forthcoming paper the Rochester researchers explain how entanglement can be found in something as ordinary as a beam of light.

Eberly explained that "it takes two to tangle."

For example, think about two hands clapping regularly. What you can be sure of is that when the right hand is moving to the right, the left hand is moving to the left, and vice versa.

But if you were asked to guess without listening or looking whether at some moment the right hand was moving to the right, or maybe to the left, you wouldn't know. But you would still know that whatever the right hand was doing at that time, the left hand would be doing the opposite. The ability to know for sure about a common property without knowing anything for sure about an individual property is the essence of perfect entanglement.

Eberly added that many think of entanglement as a quantum feature because "Schrodinger coined the term 'entanglement' to refer to his famous cat scenario." But their experiment shows that some features of the "real" world must share a key ingredient of Schrodinger's Cat domain: entanglement.

The existence of classical entanglement was pointed out in 1980, but Eberly explained that it didn't seem a very interesting concept, so it wasn't fully explored. As opposed to quantum entanglement, classical entanglement happens within one system. The effect is all local: there is no action at a distance, none of the "spookiness."

With this result, Eberly and his colleagues have shown experimentally "that the border is not where it's usually thought to be, and moreover that Bell's Inequalities should no longer be used to define the boundary."

Wed, 29 JUL 2015 11:27:38 AEST
Tokyo, Japan (SPX) Jul 24, 2015 -
A new theory says dark matter acts remarkably similar to subatomic particles known to science since the 1930s. We owe a lot to dark matter - it is the thing keeping galaxies, stars, our solar system, and our bodies intact. Yet no one has been able to observe it, and it has often been regarded as a totally new exotic form of matter, such as a particle moving in extra dimensions of space or its quantum version, super-symmetry.

Now an international group of researchers has proposed a theory that dark matter is very similar to pions, which are responsible for binding atomic nuclei together. Their findings appear in the latest Physical Review Letters, published on July 10.

"We have seen this kind of particle before. It has the same properties - same type of mass, the same type of interactions, in the same type of theory of strong interactions that gave forth the ordinary pions. It is incredibly exciting that we may finally understand why we came to exist," says Hitoshi Murayama, Professor of Physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and Director of the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe at the University of Tokyo.

The new theory predicts dark matter is likely to interact with itself within galaxies or clusters of galaxies, possibly modifying the predicted mass distributions.

"It can resolve outstanding discrepancies between data and computer simulations," says Eric Kuflik, a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell University. University of California, Berkeley postdoctoral researcher Yonit Hochberg adds, "The key differences in these properties between this new class of dark matter theories and previous ideas have profound implications on how dark matter can be discovered in upcoming experimental searches."

The next step will be to put this theory to the test using experiments such as the Large Hadron Collider and the new SuperKEK-B, and a proposed experiment SHiP.

Wed, 29 JUL 2015 11:27:38 AEST
Princeton NJ (SPX) Jul 20, 2015 -
An international team led by Princeton University scientists has discovered Weyl fermions, an elusive massless particle theorized 85 years ago. The particle could give rise to faster and more efficient electronics because of its unusual ability to behave as matter and antimatter inside a crystal, according to new research.

The researchers report in the journal Science July 16 the first observation of Weyl fermions, which, if applied to next-generation electronics, could allow for a nearly free and efficient flow of electricity in electronics, and thus greater power, especially for computers, the researchers suggest.

Proposed by the mathematician and physicist Hermann Weyl in 1929, Weyl fermions have been long sought by scientists because they have been regarded as possible building blocks of other subatomic particles, and are even more basic than the ubiquitous, negative-charge carrying electron (when electrons are moving inside a crystal).

Their basic nature means that Weyl fermions could provide a much more stable and efficient transport of particles than electrons, which are the principle particle behind modern electronics. Unlike electrons, Weyl fermions are massless and possess a high degree of mobility; the particle's spin is both in the same direction as its motion -- which is known as being right-handed -- and in the opposite direction in which it moves, or left-handed.

"The physics of the Weyl fermion are so strange, there could be many things that arise from this particle that we're just not capable of imagining now," said corresponding author M. Zahid Hasan, a Princeton professor of physics who led the research team.

The researchers' find differs from the other particle discoveries in that the Weyl fermion can be reproduced and potentially applied, Hasan said. Typically, particles such as the famous Higgs boson are detected in the fleeting aftermath of particle collisions, he said.

The Weyl fermion, however, was discovered inside a synthetic metallic crystal called tantalum arsenide that the Princeton researchers designed in collaboration with researchers at the Collaborative Innovation Center of Quantum Matter in Beijing and at National Taiwan University.

The Weyl fermion possesses two characteristics that could make its discovery a boon for future electronics, including the development of the highly prized field of efficient quantum computing, Hasan explained.

For a physicist, the Weyl fermions are most notable for behaving like a composite of monopole- and antimonopole-like particles when inside a crystal, Hasan said. This means that Weyl particles that have opposite magnetic-like charges can nonetheless move independently of one another with a high degree of mobility.

The researchers also found that Weyl fermions can be used to create massless electrons that move very quickly with no backscattering, wherein electrons are lost when they collide with an obstruction. In electronics, backscattering hinders efficiency and generates heat. Weyl electrons simply move through and around roadblocks, Hasan said.

"It's like they have their own GPS and steer themselves without scattering," Hasan said. "They will move and move only in one direction since they are either right-handed or left-handed and never come to an end because they just tunnel through. These are very fast electrons that behave like unidirectional light beams and can be used for new types of quantum computing."

Prior to the Science paper, Hasan and his co-authors published a report in the journal Nature Communications in June that theorized that Weyl fermions could exist in a tantalum arsenide crystal.

Guided by that paper, the researchers used the Princeton Institute for the Science and Technology of Materials (PRISM) and Laboratory for Topological Quantum Matter and Spectroscopy in Princeton's Jadwin Hall to research and simulate dozens of crystal structures before seizing upon the asymmetrical tantalum arsenide crystal, which has a differently shaped top and bottom.

The crystals were then loaded into a two-story device known as a scanning tunneling spectromicroscope that is cooled to near absolute zero and suspended from the ceiling to prevent even atom-sized vibrations. The spectromicroscope determined if the crystal matched the theoretical specifications for hosting a Weyl fermion. "It told us if the crystal was the house of the particle," Hasan said.

The Princeton team took the crystals passing the spectromicroscope test to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California to be tested with high-energy accelerator-based photon beams. Once fired through the crystal, the beams' shape, size and direction indicated the presence of the long-elusive Weyl fermion.

First author Su-Yang Xu, a postdoctoral research associate in Princeton's Department of Physics, said that the work was unique for encompassing theory and experimentalism.

"The nature of this research and how it emerged is really different and more exciting than most of other work we have done before," Xu said.

"Usually, theorists tell us that some compound might show some new or interesting properties, then we as experimentalists grow that sample and perform experiments to test the prediction. In this case, we came up with the theoretical prediction ourselves and then performed the experiments. This makes the final success even more exciting and satisfying than before."

In pursuing the elusive particle, the researchers had to pull from a number of disciplines, as well as just have faith in their quest and scientific instincts, Xu said.

"Solving this problem involved physics theory, chemistry, material science and, most importantly, intuition," he said. "This work really shows why research is so fascinating, because it involved both rational, logical thinking, and also sparks and inspiration."

Weyl, who worked at the Institute for Advanced Study, suggested his fermion as an alternative to the theory of relativity proposed by his colleague Albert Einstein.

Although that application never panned out, the characteristics of his theoretical particle intrigued physicists for nearly a century, Hasan said. Actually observing the particle was a trying process -- one ambitious experiment proposed colliding high-energy neutrinos to test if the Weyl fermion was produced in the aftermath, he said.

The hunt for the Weyl fermion began in the earliest days of quantum theory when physicists first realized that their equations implied the existence of antimatter counterparts to commonly known particles such as electrons, Hasan said.

"People figured that although Weyl's theory was not applicable to relativity or neutrinos, it is the most basic form of fermion and had all other kinds of weird and beautiful properties that could be useful," he said.

"After more than 80 years, we found that this fermion was already there, waiting. It is the most basic building block of all electrons," he said. "It is exciting that we could finally make it come out following Weyl's 1929 theoretical recipe."

Ashvin Vishwanath, a professor of physics at the University of California-Berkeley who was not involved in the study, commented, "Professor Hasan's experiments report the observation of both the unusual properties in the bulk of the crystal as well as the exotic surface states that were theoretically predicted. While it is early to say what practical implications this discovery might have, it is worth noting that Weyl materials are direct 3-D electronic analogs of graphene, which is being seriously studied for potential applications."

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Wed, 29 JUL 2015 11:27:38 AEST
Bristol, England (UPI) Jul 14, 2015 -
As any high-schooler will attest, there is no shortage of ways to demonstrate the frustrating complexities of physics. But one problem stands out as a favorite for showcasing physics' counterintuities -- the two-ball bounce problem.

The problem is demonstrated by dropping a smaller ball and larger ball together, the smaller ball positioned directly on top of the larger ball. The result -- using a tennis ball and basketball, for example -- is a smaller ball bouncing unexpectedly high, three or four times the height from which it was dropped.

Researchers at the University of Bristol recently revisited the classic classroom demonstration and located flaws in the traditional explanation.

Textbooks explain the phenomenon as a demonstration of two basic physic premises, Newton's law of restitution and the the law of conservation of momentum. It turns out, the explanation is based on a flawed reality.

The high bounce is the product of human error, as demonstrators aren't able to drop the balls simultaneously. Inevitably, the smaller ball is dropped a brief moment later, and it is this gap that enables the high bounce.

When Bristol researchers revisited the phenomenon using the preciseness of computers and the keen eye of a high-speed camera, they found the closer the balls are together when dropped, the less impressive the bounce.

That traditional explanation assumes two separate but simultaneous collisions -- the basketball bounces of the floor, the tennis ball bounces off the rebounding basketball. But unless the two balls are dropped with a sizable gap between them, the basketball is still in contact with the ground when the tennis ball hits -- the order of collisions is actually reversed.

What researchers determined, was that the basketball acts like a trampoline. Upon impact, the basketball's compression excites an elastic wave that catapults the tennis ball back into the air. The effect is weakened as the gap between the two dropped balls narrows.

"Understanding how spherical bodies behave when they collide has important implications when modelling 'granular materials', such as sand, as these are can be treated as a collection of lots of tiny spheres," Yani Berdeni, a PhD student in Bristol's engineering department, explained in a press release.

Berdeni and his colleagues published their findings in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A.

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Wed, 29 JUL 2015 11:27:38 AEST
Boston MA (SPX) Jul 20, 2015 -
Weyl points, the 3D analogues of the structures that make graphene exceptional, were theoretically predicted in 1929. Today, an international team of Physicists from MIT and Zhejiang University, found them in photonic crystals, opening a new dimension in photonics.

In 1928 the English physicist Paul Dirac discovered a crucial equation in particle physics and quantum mechanics, now known as Dirac equation, which describes relativistic wave-particles. Very fast electrons were solutions to the Dirac equation. Moreover, the equation predicted the existence of anti-electrons, or positrons: particles with the same mass as electrons but having opposite charge.

True to Dirac's prediction, positrons were discovered four years later, in 1932, by the American physicist Carl Anderson. In 1929 Hermann Weyl, a German-born mathematician, found another solution to the Dirac equation, this time massless [1].

A year later, the Austrian-born theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli postulated the existence of the neutrino, which was then thought to be massless, and it was assumed to be the sought-after solution to the Dirac equation found by Weyl. Neutrinos had not been detected yet in nature, but the case seemed to be closed.

It would be decades before American physicists Frederick Reines and Clyde Cowan finally discovered neutrinos in 1957, and numerous experiments shortly thereafter indicated that neutrinos could have mass. In 1998, the Super-Kamiokande (a neutrino observatory located in Japan) Collaboration announced what had now been speculated for years: neutrinos have non-zero mass. This discovery opened a new question: what then was the zero-mass solution found by Weyl?

Ling Lu, first author of the paper published in Science, is very enthusiastic: "Weyl points do actually exist in nature! We built a double-gyroid photonic crystal with broken parity symmetry. The light that passes through the crystal shows the signature of Weyl points in reciprocal space: two linear dispersion bands touching at isolated points."

Weyl points, the solutions to the massless Dirac equation, were not found in particle experiments. The research team had to build a tailored material to observe them. The double-gyroid photonic crystal is itself a work of art. Gyroids indeed can be found in nature, in systems as different as butterfly wings and ketchup [2,3].

However, the research group wanted a double-gyroid with a very specific broken symmetry, first proposed in a theoretical work by the same group[4]. In order to fabricate this structure, with parts that are interlocking and with ad hoc defects (such as symmetry-breaking air holes), Lu and collaborators had to drill, machine, and stack slabs of ceramic-filled plastics.

Once the sample was ready, it was time to observe if it behaved as expected, by shining light through it and analyzing the outgoing signal. Physicists analyze these experiments in what is called reciprocal space, or momentum space.

"The discovery of Weyl points is not only the smoking gun to a scientific mystery," comments MIT Professor Marin Soljaci, "it paves the way to absolutely new photonic phenomena and applications. Think of the graphene revolution: graphene is a 2D structure, and its electronic properties are, to a substantial extent, a consequence of the existence of linear degeneracy points (known as Dirac points) in its momentum space. Materials containing Weyl points do the same in 3D. They literally add one degree of freedom, one dimension."

The discovery of graphene and its unique electronic properties was lauded with the 2010 Nobel Prize in physics, yet graphene's Dirac points are not stable to perturbations. On the other hand, the structures introduced by Lu et al. are very stable to perturbations, offering a new tool to control how light is confined, how it bounces, and how it radiates.

This discovery opens a new intriguing field in basic physics. The potential applications are equally promising. Examples include the possibility to build angularly selective 3D materials and more powerful single-frequency lasers.

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Wed, 29 JUL 2015 11:27:38 AEST
Basel, Switzerland (SPX) Jul 16, 2015 -
Scientists at the University of Basel were able to identify for the first time a molecule responsible for the absorption of starlight in space: the positively charged Buckminsterfullerene, or so-called football molecule. Their results have been published in the current issue of Nature.

Almost 100 years ago, astronomers discovered that the spectrum of star light arrived on earth with dark gaps, so-called interstellar bands. Ever since, researchers have been trying to find out which type of matter in space absorbs the light and is responsible for these "diffuse interstellar bands" (DIB) of which over 400 are known today.

Football molecule and interstellar clouds
Astronomers have been suspecting for a while that big complex molecules and gaseous ions based on carbon could be absorbing the starlight. The Buckminsterfullerene is such a molecule: a structure made up of 60 carbon atoms shaped like a football that was first discovered in the mid-1980s.

After this discovery, the questions arose if it was possible that the football molecule was in fact responsible for the DIB. The research team led by Prof. John P. Maier from the Department of Chemistry at the University of Basel has been studying the electronic absorption of the ionized Buckminsterfullerene since 1993.

In fact, the spectrum measured in the lab did show absorption features at two wavelengths that were near two DIB that had been discovered by astronomers the following year.

Conditions similar to outer space
In order to unequivocally prove that these molecules absorb starlight and thus produce the DIB, a gas phase spectrum of the ion was needed. The Basel researchers now succeeded at this: "This is the very first unequivocal identification of such a molecule in the interstellar clouds", says Professor John P. Maier. "We have achieved a breakthrough in solving the old riddle of the diffuse interstellar bands."

In order to obtain the spectrum in the laboratory using a diode laser, several thousand ionized Fullerenes were confined in a radiofrequency trap and cooled down by collisions with high density helium to very low temperatures of around 6 degree Kelvin - conditions very similar to outer space.

The absorptions measured in the laboratory coincide exactly with the astronomical data, and have comparable bandwidths and relative intensities. This identifies for the first time two DIB and proves that ionized Buckminsterfullerene (C60+) is present at the gas-phase in space. "This is remarkable, considering the complexity of this molecular ion and the presence of high-energy radiation in such an environment", says Maier.

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Wed, 29 JUL 2015 11:27:38 AEST
Vienna, Austria (SPX) Jul 14, 2015 -
Plants and bacteria make use of sunlight with remarkably high efficiency: nine out of ten absorbed light particles are being put to use in an ordinary bacterium.

For years, it has been a pressing question of modern research whether or not effects from quantum physics are responsible for this outstanding performance of natural light harvesters.

A team of European research groups, a collaboration between universities in Vienna, Ulm, Cartagena, Prague, Berlin and Lund, have examined these quantum effects in an artificial model system.

It was shown that the hotly debated quantum phenomena can be understood as a delicate interplay between vibrations and electrons of the involved molecules. The resulting theoretical model explains the experiments perfectly. The article was published in Nature Communications.

The studied artificial light harvester is a supramolecule, consisting of hundreds of thousands of light absorbing molecules, arranged in close proximity to one another and in an orderly fashion.

Such architecture puts these systems in between noisy living cells and strictly organized quantum experiments at low temperatures: supramolecules are still governed by the same quantum effects as natural photosynthetic systems, but without the noisy background that makes their investigation so difficult in biological systems.

The research team employed polarized light to isolate the desired quantum-dynamical effects. Studying such ordered systems does not only further our understanding of natural photosynthesis, it also helps us to appreciate the physical mechanisms necessary for energy-efficient, cheaper, more flexible and lighter photovoltaic cells.

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Wed, 29 JUL 2015 11:27:38 AEST
Syracuse NY (SPX) Jul 15, 2015 -
Physicists in Syracuse University's College of Arts and Sciences have confirmed the existence of two rare pentaquark states. Their discovery, which has taken place at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, Switzerland, is said to have major implications for the study of the structure of matter.

It also puts to rest a 51-year-old mystery, in which American physicist Murray Gell-Mann famously posited the existence of fundamental subatomic constituents called quarks, which form particles such as protons. In 1964, he said that, in addition to a constituent with three quarks, there could be one with four quarks and an anti-quark, known as a "pentaquark." Until now, the search for pentaquarks has been fruitless.

"The statistical evidence of these new pentatquark states is beyond question," says Sheldon Stone, Distinguished Professor of Physics, who helped engineer the discovery. "Although some positive evidence was reported around 10 years ago, those results have been thoroughly debunked. Since then, the LHCb [Large Hadron Collider beauty] collaboration has been particularly deliberate in its study."

In addition to Stone, the research team includes other physicists with ties to Syracuse: Tomasz Skwarnicki, professor of physics; Nathan Jurik G'16, a Ph.D. student; and Liming Zhang, a former University research associate who is now an associate professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China.

Liming, in fact, is presenting the findings at a LHCb workshop on Wednesday, July 22, at CERN.

Stone credits Gell-Mann, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist who spent much of his career at Caltech, for postulating the existence of quarks, which are fractionally charged objects that make up matter.

"He predicted that strongly interacting particles [hadrons] are formed from quark-antiquark pairs [mesons] or from three quarks [baryons]," Stone says. "This classification scheme, which has grown to encompass hadrons with four and five quarks, underscores the Standard Model, which explains the physical make-up of the Universe."

Stone says that, while his team's discovery is remarkable, it still begs many questions. One of them is the issue of how quarks bind together. The traditional answer has been a residual nuclear force, approximately 10 million times stronger than the chemical binding in atoms.

But not all bindings are created equal, Skwarnicki says. "Quarks may be tightly bound or loosely bound in a meson-baryon molecule," he explains. "The color-neutral meson and baryon feel a residual strong force [that is] similar to the one binding nucleons to form nuclei."

Adds Stone: "The theory of strong interactions is the only strongly coupled theory we have. It is particularly important for us to understand, as it not only describes normal matter, but also serves as a precursor for future theories."

The discovery is the latest in a string of successes for Syracuse's Department of Physics, which made international Syracuse physicists confirm existence of rare pentaquarks discoverys last year, when Skwarnicki helped prove the existence of a meson named Z(4430), with two quarks and two antiquarks.

Much of this cutting-edge work occurs at CERN, where Stone oversees more than a dozen Syracuse researchers. CERN houses four multinational experiments, each with its own detector for collecting data from the LHC particle accelerator.

Now, a team based in Asia has demonstrated that electron transport depends on temperature. It follows a scaling governed by a power law - and not the exponential scaling previously envisaged. These findings were recently published in EPJ B by Yunyun Li Tongji University, Shanghai, China, and colleagues in Singapore.

Heat conduction depends on the internal energy transferred by microscopic diffusion and collisions of particles, such as electrons, within a given body. Anomalous heat conduction can be best studied in a particular kind of model: one that accounts for the thermal transport in a one-dimensional (1D) lattice. In this study, the chosen 1D model is dubbed the coupled rotator lattice model.

The specificities of the chosen model is that it conserves heat conductions - that is heat transport and heat diffusion - as well as momentum diffusion. Under these conditions, the expectation is that the heat conduction would be anomalous. But in reality, numerical simulations have previously demonstrated that the model exhibits normal heat conduction.

For physicists, these results don't intuitively match the fact the heat is diffusing in a way that preserves its momentum. To complement their approach, they also drew a comparison with a single kicked rotator.

The authors systematically investigated how heat conductivity changes with temperature in the selected 1D model. This approach led them to the thesis that heat conductivity correlates with a power law, instead of an exponential scaling as previously predicted. Further, this phenomenon occurs without a transition temperature above which the heat conduction is normal and below which it is anomalous.